Eisenhower: The White House Years Read online

  The honeymoon was similarly modest. The couple spent a few days at a resort in Eldorado Springs, outside Denver. The newlyweds briefly returned to Denver before heading by train to Abilene, where they arrived at 3:00 a.m. and Mamie met Ike’s family for the first time. She took an instant liking to Milton. “I’ve always wanted to have a brother!” she exclaimed, kissing him on the cheek. He was charmed.

  The early years of Ike and Mamie’s marriage were often difficult as they learned to support each other amid the rigors of Army life. Raised in his stern home and educated at West Point, Ike could be domineering, while Mamie, the product of her more voluble and emotional upbringing, was occasionally tempestuous. Soon after their wedding, the two experienced their first fight, and Mamie struck Ike’s hand. Their rings collided, and Mamie’s broke the amethyst stone in Ike’s. “Well, young lady,” he said coldly, “for that display of temper you will replace this stone with your own money.” And yet Ike also could be a dedicated and thoughtful husband: at every wedding anniversary through the 1930s, he added one piece of silver to Mamie’s tea set, eventually completing it; she displayed it with pride the rest of her life.

  If Ike was sometimes bossy and Mamie could be prissy, well, they adjusted. Mamie had grown up wealthy and was now forced to cope with Army life, though the privations were eased somewhat by an allowance from her father. Ike had grown up with men and boys and now had to adjust himself to life with a woman. He showed affection with a gentle pinch more often than a warm embrace; he cooked but preferred to do so on a grill or over a fire. He enjoyed cards—he had long been a ferocious poker player and later developed into such a demanding bridge partner that many of his closest friends hated to be his partner—but found it difficult to play with Mamie because she would make mistakes and he could be witheringly critical. “Ike never had the slightest notion how to live with women,” Mamie gently complained in retirement.

  Fifteen months after Ike and Mamie were married, they were parents. Doud Dwight Eisenhower was born on September 24, 1917, his father a newly promoted captain. His parents called him Ikey at first, then Icky. He was a healthy boy, spirited and bright, openly adored by his father. When Ike and Mamie were transferred to Fort Meade, soldiers there nicknamed him “Mascot of the Corps.” He loved to march about in his miniature Army uniform and was delighted by football and tanks, parades and pageantry. Ike’s reserve melted in the presence of his son. “I was inclined to display Icky and his talents at the slightest excuse, or without one, for that matter,” Eisenhower wrote many years later. “In his company, I’m sure I strutted a bit and Mamie was thoroughly happy that … her two men were with her.”

  As Christmas of 1920 approached, Ike splurged on his son. The house was decorated. A red tricycle shimmered beneath the tree. A few days before the holiday, Mamie went into town to do some shopping and returned to find that Icky was not feeling well. The base doctor looked at him but thought little of it, suggesting that perhaps he’d eaten something that did not agree with him. Then Icky began to run a fever, and the following morning the doctor advised that he be admitted to the hospital. As he was carried out of the house, Icky pointed at the tricycle and smiled.

  His condition worsened, and it took a civilian doctor to realize that he had scarlet fever. Icky was quarantined. Ike took up a spot on the other side of the glass, talking to his son, comforting him but unable to hold or touch him. Scarlet fever turned to meningitis. Late one night, while Mamie teetered on the edge of pneumonia, Ike was allowed past the glass to hold his boy one more time. Icky died in his father’s embrace. Ike never quite recovered. He and Mamie had difficulty sleeping, and Ike withdrew into his grief. On January 2 every year thereafter, he sent Mamie yellow roses. Icky loved yellow.

  Nearly half a century later, as he reflected on a career filled with accomplishment and the crushingly serious duty of sending soldiers to their deaths, Ike described the loss of his son as “the greatest disappointment and disaster in my life.” Even at the vantage of so many years and such ranging experience, he added: “Today when I think of it, even now as I write it, the keenness of our loss comes back to me as fresh and terrible as it was in that long dark day soon after Christmas, 1920.”

  Icky’s death was the most tragic moment in Ike and Mamie’s long marriage; it changed them both and for a time introduced a reserve between them. It was not, however, the only crisis they endured as a couple. They both struggled with their health: Mamie battled heart problems from her youth, as well as shaky balance brought on by an inner-ear affliction; Ike picked up an intestinal disorder that would flare up periodically over the years, sometimes causing nearly unbearable pain. Their marriage came closest to failing in the early 1920s, when Mamie left Ike for a time—driven from him by the hardships of a tropical posting and his devotion to duty, sometimes at the expense of his wife. And it was tested again twenty years after that, when Ike’s affections for his wartime driver wounded Mamie.

  The latter episode is the best-known friction in the Eisenhower marriage, one exhaustively, if delicately, examined in their lifetimes. It began with World War II raging, a time of nearly unimaginable pressure on Eisenhower as he assembled, trained, and planned for the moment that would chart the course of liberty and the future of his country, as well as the millions of lives placed at his disposal. Under the circumstances, one might be inclined to forgive him indiscretions; one might excuse an affair by a man so far from home, so immersed in the fate of his men and their cause. What we do not know, even these many decades later, is whether the rumors, gossip, and reports of his affection for his wartime driver, the strikingly beautiful Kay Summersby, were merely titillating innuendo or correctly recorded a betrayal of Mamie.

  Summersby herself left conflicting accounts. She wrote one memoir soon after the war that Eisenhower and those close to him eyed nervously. It was fond and appreciative but in no way suggested a romantic relationship. Years later, after Eisenhower had died, Summersby wrote a second memoir; in it, she described, albeit in somewhat modest terms, a physical affair. Aides from the war years vehemently contested Summersby’s account. It troubled Mamie, but she willfully declined to entertain the possibility that her husband had been unfaithful to her.

  During the war, there were no such written reflections by the principals, but the speculation about a relationship between the two was probably inevitable and certainly widespread. Eisenhower was at the center of England’s attention in the war years, and Summersby was a shapely associate. That was bound to wag tongues, and photographs of Summersby occasionally made their way into the American press, agitating Mamie, who was far away, lonely, and worried. Her correspondence with Ike in the early months of the war—when Summersby was pictured in Life magazine and later shown with Eisenhower in North Africa (her ship had been torpedoed en route, and she and other passengers were rescued after being plunged into the Mediterranean)—indicates Mamie’s unhappiness at what she perceived as a close relationship between her husband and his driver.

  In his letters to Mamie, Ike avoided mentioning Summersby by name. “There are also a couple of WAACS around the office,” he wrote reassuringly, if misleadingly, in early 1943, “but I never use one unless Marshall [another aide] is so busy that I am forced to do so. He’s cheery, efficient and always on the job.” That apparently did not calm Mamie entirely, for a few weeks later Ike wrote again that she should not “go bothering your pretty head about WAACS.” In the early stages of the war, Summersby was engaged to a soldier, and that helped placate Mamie until reports began to question her fiancé’s fidelity and background, adding a tawdry side element to the rumors about Ike and Kay. When Kay’s fiancé was killed by a mine, Ike used the occasion first to scold Mamie about her inquiries and then, still again, to reassure her, this time somewhat more thoughtfully:

  Your letters often give me some hint of your loneliness, your bewilderment and your worries in carrying your own part in this emergency. Don’t ever think that I do not understand or that I am not truly
sympathetic to the lost feeling you must so often have. Just please remember that no matter how short my notes I love you—I could never be in love with anyone else—and that you fill my thoughts and hopes for the future always. You never seem quite to comprehend how deeply I depend upon you and need you. So when you’re lonely, try to remember that I’d rather be by your side than anywhere else in the world.

  Whether or not the relationship between Ike and Kay was romantic, it was undeniably affectionate. She was a physical woman, an accomplished rider, brave, and outgoing. For a man who connected with women through “a pinch and a kick,” as Mamie put it, Kay was a welcome companion. Throughout the war and in its immediate aftermath, Kay was often by his side; they even shared a dog, a rambunctious little Scottie named Telek, which she bought for him as a present.

  Upon arriving in England in 1942, Ike had vowed never to partake of London’s nightlife until Hitler was vanquished—it was, he believed, vulgar to be seen celebrating while charged with the duty of deciding men’s fates. But when at last the war in Europe ended, Eisenhower treated himself to a night on the town. “I wonder if you people realize what it means to me to be back here among friends,” Ike said as he stood to dance. Then he reached for the hand of his partner. Eisenhower’s first dance at the end of the war was with Kay. Mamie must have been hurt; she forwarded a clip with news of the dance to her parents.

  After the war, other deputies from Ike’s European headquarters helped Kay to land jobs and persevere through crises. Just as important, those aides studiously kept her away from Eisenhower himself, and he assumed a guarded distance from her, a pose that could be interpreted as either cutting off a former lover or simply distancing himself from a potential liability at a time when his own political aspirations were hardening. Moreover, Kay took advantage of her connection to Eisenhower; she tried to use it to secure a job at the Pentagon, and her presumption irritated him. In either case, Ike’s distance was a source of obvious pain to Summersby, and Eisenhower inflicted it knowingly. When, for instance, Kay reached out to him in 1948 with news that her sister had died and her mother had suffered a breakdown as a result, she included in her note a plea. “When you have some spare time, I should love to see you,” Summersby wrote, “also want to ask your advice regarding a number of things.” Ike tersely turned aside her attempt to meet, even though both were in New York at the time. “I can scarcely estimate when there might arise an opportunity for you to come past the office,” he wrote. Kay never again made such a request.

  It was his son John who understood their relationship best. He saw them together, enjoying their dog, playing bridge, working; he understood that their relationship soothed his father. “Americans are funny,” he reflected more than sixty years later. “They don’t understand that a rapport is much more serious than a roll in the hay. Kay and my dad had a rapport, of which I very much approved.”

  The marriage of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower would endure its share of travails. They would weather separations and difficult, occasionally public challenges. Gossips would titter about her drinking (Mamie’s ear disorder affected her balance, causing her sometimes to seem wobbly, as if drunk) and snicker over his alleged affair with Summersby. Even after his death, the publication of Summersby’s second memoir profoundly agitated Mamie, especially when a television miniseries glamorized the relationship. Ike and Mamie would lose one son and raise another; they would suffer failings of health and moments of irritation. But their marriage survived. It nurtured both for all the rest of their days together.

  2

  The Mentoring of Soldiers

  George S. Patton Jr. was a colorful, charismatic, strange man—mercurial, romantic, profane, brash, and emotional. He was a native of Southern California, raised in a wealthy home by doting parents. As a boy, he struggled with dyslexia; he stayed out of school for years, afraid of the humiliation of not being able to read well. Nevertheless, he privately immersed himself in the classics and tales of chivalry; they bore deeply into him. Young George came to believe in reincarnation and imagined himself a reborn soldier from ancient times.

  Guided by a father whom he worshipped, Patton overcame his limitations as a student and pursued the greatness he felt history had ordained for him. Along the way, he met Beatrice Banning Ayer, a well-to-do, refined, and startlingly pretty young woman, during a family sojourn to Catalina Island in 1902. The children put on a play. As one of Patton’s many biographers records: “Beatrice Ayer was polished in the principal role. George Patton was overdramatic in his.” Beatrice, or Bea, as she would become known, was from then on the object of Patton’s fascination; she counseled him through Virginia Military Institute and then West Point, proofreading his papers, indulging his black moods and insecurities. Patton graduated, fought with heroism in World War I, and then, back in the United States, was fatefully assigned to Fort Meade.

  When Ike moved to Fort Meade in 1919—freshly back from a sixty-one-day, cross-country tour intended to draw attention to the nation’s threadbare road network—the base assigned him to run-down wooden barracks with one distinct advantage: his next-door neighbors were George and Bea Patton.

  Eisenhower and Patton struck up a fast, if unlikely, friendship, genial Ike and stormy George. At its core was a common appreciation for tanks. Eisenhower and Patton experimented relentlessly with the still-developing tanks of their day, stripping them down and rebuilding them, scuttling across the countryside to test their mobility and firepower. They loved the work and plunged into it with childlike gusto. Ike and others who had not seen action in the war raptly absorbed Patton’s descriptions of battles, then tested their tanks under the conditions that Patton suggested.

  One day, a Mark VIII tank with its hefty Liberty engine, designed for an airplane but retrofitted for the tank, came straining over the top of a ravine, towing two smaller tanks with inch-thick steel cables. As Eisenhower and Patton watched the tank strain up the hill, they were startled by a ripping sound. They wheeled around just as a cable snapped, skimming the surface of the hillside “like a striking black snake,” mowing down brush, and nearly decapitating the two soldiers. They both went pale. Later that night, Patton broached the subject. “Ike, were you as scared as I was?” Eisenhower admitted it. “I was afraid to bring the subject up,” he answered.

  Shared danger and common curiosity bound the two men. Together, they explored the range of their equipment and its tactical ability. Conventional military strategy of the day imagined limited use for tanks, as clunky vehicles attached to infantry units and primarily used to clear out machine-gun nests. But Patton and Eisenhower conceived of faster, more nimble tanks, massed for impact rather than merely intended as infantry support. They were both impressed by the work of an inventor named J. Walter Christie, who had put together a design for a much speedier machine. As they experimented, Eisenhower and Patton both wrote articles on the subject and published their works in Infantry Journal. In his, Eisenhower argued that the old style of tank would be replaced by a “speedy, reliable and efficient engine of destruction.” Patton concluded that tanks should be given independence from infantry. Likening tanks to the air service, he said, “They are destined for a separate existence.”

  Those were provocative ideas, and they attracted unfavorable notice within the Army. Patton and Eisenhower were ordered to cease their advocacy of tanks or risk court-martial. Chastened and irritated, they backed down, but the sullen response from the Pentagon only drove the two closer together in their friendship, which now featured a mutual belligerence.

  Patton did more than just ignite Eisenhower’s military imagination. He supplied Ike with a model of loyalty, one that highlighted duty to service and country but not abject subservience. Patton could be absurd—grandiose in ways that Ike would never emulate—but he was forcefully his own man, utterly of the Army but not beholden to it. What’s more, George and Bea Patton were the center of a sparse social community, and Patton absorbed the Eisenhowers into it. Patton hosted Sunday
suppers, and Ike, grafting Patton’s tradition onto an older one of Mamie’s family, began a Sunday brunch buffet. It became known as “Club Eisenhower.”

  Those brunches and suppers were a mainstay of officer life on the base, with the Eisenhowers and Pattons regularly hosting each other as well as guests from Washington and elsewhere. Brigadier General Fox Conner was vacationing at the Adirondack camp that belonged to his wife’s family in the fall of 1919, when he accepted Patton’s invitation to dinner. Conner was a gentle Mississippi man with a soft accent and a stocky, imposing mien, a philosopher of sorts comfortable with Shakespeare and Tacitus, full of literary and experienced wisdom. He had served as chief of operations during the recently concluded war and was already acquiring a reputation as a mentor to promising young officers. Moreover, his background was in artillery, so the tank was especially intriguing to him for its firepower and mobility. Thus, unlike his more defensive counterparts, Conner was intrigued rather than threatened by the ideas Patton and Eisenhower were promulgating. He spent the afternoon closely questioning the two men. Ike, aware that Conner was not only one of the Army’s most senior officers but also one of its most highly regarded intellectuals, answered carefully and sometimes at length. They talked until nightfall. Conner said little, but Ike had made an impression.

  George and Bea Patton left Camp Meade in September 1920. Even after he’d gone, Patton remained a presence in Ike’s life, infusing his friend with his episodically brilliant insights and aphorisms on war and courage. “What is it,” Patton asked in a letter in 1926, “that makes the Poor S.O.B. who constitutes the casualtie lists fight[?]” Patton’s answer: leadership.